Tag Archives: oak harbor

In which our intrepid hero discovers the new adventures of Old Christine…

The photographs in this excursion are mostly sunny, which has certainly been an exception for me in 2013. Writing this in early August, I can attest that the vast majority of weekends between April (when I started these excursions) and now have been overcast or rainy. I lost a number of Saturdays simply because it was too rainy to bother going out. This is in sharp contrast to recent years, in which rain has been rather sparse. Good for farmers, bad for junior amateur shutterbugs like me.

When I was a kid, my dad had hunting friends who owned a gas station and convenience store (with a rare New Mexico liquor license) at Caballo Lake, a reservoir in southern New Mexico formed by damming the Rio Grande. We would occasionally go up there (a two hour drive) and spend the day there. However, the place was still a bit of a distance from the lake—too much for a kid—and so we didn’t really see the lake except as a distance. I think I may have only been out on the lake itself once, on a small boat. So I truly was “underexposed” to large bodies of water as a kid. I remember when I was 17 or so and had to fly from El Paso to Pennsylvania. The plane changed in Chicago and I was able to see Lake Michigan (from the air) for the first time. It was remarkable—like an ocean to me (who had not yet seen one).